April 17, 2026, 2:51am 1

I am thinking of installing CachyOS on my ASUS Vivobook laptop because while I love the release model that Fedora follows and think it’s a great distro overall, I have had a few issues with the kernel (namely excessive temporary slowdown after resuming from sleep, and sometimes long startup times), and I have been very intrigued by CachyOS for a while by now and want to try it.

I also want to dip my toes into Arch a little bit, but not so much that I have to setup every single thing (doing that on a VM was a mind-numbing experience), because I am bored and don’t know how else to spend my time after refining my Fedora setup.

But I don’t want to replace Fedora yet, neither do I want to replace Windows because I’m just trying out Cachy and am making a transition, and there are still rare cases where I need to keep Windows around, so I will have to multi-boot Windows and two Linux distros on the same drive. Yes, I know everyone advises to separate Windows on another drive, but I don’t think I can feasibly do that on a laptop + Windows has not once messed with my EFI partition on my laptops even after many updates so I don’t mind.

Here is my partition scheme for context, I want to install CachyOS using Limine on UEFI/GPT while multi-booting Windows and Fedora at the same time (yeah I’m aware this is ridiculous, I still need my Fedora OS and for some reason didn’t separate my user files/home into another partition so it will have to be this way for the time being):

The wiki says for manual partitioning I should have a 4GB FAT32 /boot partition separated by a root partition when using Limine. But how do I proceed with that, because 1. my actual ESP is in /boot/efi with 260MB and 2. my extended boot partition (XBOOTLDR I assume) is of ext4 type and mounted to /boot with 1GB? Heard Limine is also designed to be used with FAT filesystems as well so you can probably understand where things get confusing for my setup.

Looking forward to any response or guidance on this topic. Thanks.

Can’t really help you out on your original topic but:

Try this or that. Got me entertained for 1000s of hours

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I would increase EFI from 260MB to at least 500MB.

/boot might be separate partition from fedora if mounted with uuid (and need be at least 2GB or better, 4GB). If limine works with `/boot` on btrfs subvolume then there’s no problem at all. You make one btrfs partition and the rest is inside.

I’m using grub so don’t know anything about limine.

If using limine you need the big EFS mounted in /boot, so make a new one.

The small one isn’t officially supported on cachy, but not impossible to use with grub or rEFInd

Feels like an awful lot of personal preference involved. Are you aiming to use snapshots with limine? How comfy are you manually mucking about? Is this just a trial balloon that gets wiped eventually - even if sticking with cachy, or an OS install you might ultimately keep?

The biggest benefit to using the bootloaders that cachy installs are that they integrate with things like snapshot booting etc. - but you don’t actually need to boot cachy with a cachy-installed bootloader. I don’t on this laptop - I boot cachy with zfsbootmenu (that on this computer I installed simply by downloading the binary distribution from github) and choose between cachy and an infrequently-needed windows using rEFInd (I just copied in that EFI binary as well…)

This lets me use the similar small EFI to yours, and ZBM gives me the functionality I want/need (less handholding for things like snapshot rollback, but that’s fine by me)

On install I just did a manual partition, mounted my EFS at /boot/EFI, and chose rEFInd (which didn’t initially install in the “right” location but that doesn’t really matter - I just moved it and uninstalled the package) plus copied in ZBM. The installed warned “this might not be bootable” but that really means “it’s up to you”.

If you’re happy with Fedora and would likely either keep it long-term or do a clean-slate setup of cachy, I’d just try to boot cachy with Fedora’s existing bootloader as my first choice if I didn’t need bootable snapshots.